Year: 2009

It happens a million times a day. Somebody pays cash for something and gets change. But there are rules, and Raymond’s friend seems to like to break those rules. Luckily for Raymond’s friend, one of the rules is the customer is always right… or as Mr. Krabs would say, the money is always right. This…

There’s an MSDN sample of how to turn on HDCP or SCMS in a playback app. The sample is loosely based on a test app I wrote, but there are still some rough edges. For example, the CMFAttributeImpl<T> template is not part of the SDK or the DDK. Also, there’s a leak in the GetDigitalAudioEndpoint…

I was reading László Polgár’s excellent book Chess: 5334 Problems, Combinations, and Games and ran across #1071, White to move and mate in 2: The purported solution is… 1. ♘xf6+ ♚xf62. ♕f7# … which, indeed, works – and there is no other mate in two that I can see – so why blog this? Because there’s…

If you’re installing Windows via a boot DVD, and you choose Custom, you have the option to rearrange partitions. I like use this to have each drive be one big partition. Windows 7 wants to set aside a 100 MB partition for something-or-other. I’m sure there’s a very good reason for this but I am…

As preparation for moving one of my machines from Vista to Windows 7, I’m compiling a list of all the little tweaks I like to make to machines that I use a lot: Boot from the Windows DVD. Delete all partitions; make each hard drive one big partition. (Hmm… apparently Windows 7 really wants a…

Three quarters are better than a dollar because they make noise! — Lilly, Lilly’s Purple Plastic Purse Last time I talked about how to calculate a sine sweep mathematically. There’s a closed-form solution which is quite elegant but, alas, useless in a practical computer implementation due to the very big numbers that are being fed…

Suppose you want to generate a continuous sine-sweep from time tstart to time tend. You want the starting frequency to be ωstart, and the ending frequency to be ωend; you want the sweep to be logarithmic, so that octaves are swept out in equal times. (The alternative would be to sweep linearly, but usually logarithmic…